Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/precious
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, draw language in the Secret Santa and regift the bath bombs it gave me last year.
This is the second half of the pair of episodes about engravings: the first was about epitaphs on gravestones, and this episode similarly is about words engraved onto a very durable substance, where they’ll be read by generations to come. This episode was reported by producer Arlie Adlington.
On with the show.
MAX ULLMANN: I like how this is typical of all antique jewellery, in a way, it's just completely symmetrical and totally imperfect. In a world of perceived perfection, this is far more interesting. You know, you can really see that somebody is done that by hand. You know, the A is lower than the Z and the E, the horizontal arms of the E, are too short by modern standards. It’s certainly not perfect. There's bits and pieces of the letters missing, but you can really put yourself in the position of the person doing it, who obviously was not able to achieve this kind of perceived perfection because they're human.
People definitely still want to have things engraved, but being an engraver is not a highly paid aspect to our trade. And the nature of of London and modern life is that, you know, how can you afford to go into that profession if it doesn't allow you to live?
STEVEN YARDLEY: Luckily for us, there's still work out there for us. But it's a dying trade. We're probably the youngest people that still do it in London now. As engravers retire and less come through, they just sort of either don't have it engraved or they’ll just move across to machine. You can't do everything by machine. There's probably 50 percent of what we do you couldn't do by machine. But if you can't get it done, you don't advertise it.
HZ: Steven Yardley is the Yardley half of Milne & Yardley. Based in Mayfair in London, they specialise in hand engraving.
STEVEN YARDLEY: We're in a workshop, second floor, above Brown's restaurant, and basically there's two benches and two of us doing hand engraving the old traditional way. Simple as that, really. This is where we originally started, both of us when we were 16, 17 years old. So we’ve really been the only been in about two rooms in our life working. So nothing really changes, really. We just used the same tools, just we tape when we were apprentices. It's probably one of the very few parts of the jewellery trade that hasn't really been affected by technology at all. The tools are not, you know, powered by electricity or anything, just by us: pieces of stainless steel, we just sharpen them to a point. The only electricity we use is a lamp. That's it. So, yeah, nothing's really changed, I don't think anything’s changed in the way that we do jobs now as we did when we were 16 years old.
There's nothing we haven't really engraved, if it's not to do with jewellery. Rob's over there, he's doing now a coat of arms on a pen stand, silver pen stand. I'm doing a silver photo frame. Earlier we were doing wedding rings.
MAX ULLMANN: My name is Max Ullmann. We are in my family shop, with my dad and my sister. We run an antique jewellery shop in central London. It was my great-grandfather's business originally, started in 1900 in Budapest, and then in London since 1950 by my grandfather. My dad has been here since 1958, and in the last 15, 20 years or so mean two of my sisters have joined.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Do you see a lot of objects come in that have engravings on?
MAX ULLMANN: Yeah, tons. Tons. Because of the nature of what we do, which is primarily antiques, so you're talking about things from early 1900s, early 1800s. In those periods there was a lot of reasons why people would have things engraved. A lot of the reasons are similar to today: for personalization and that sort of thing. Lots and lots of other reasons why people would have had things engraved over the years. Lots of symbolism, lots of decorative purposes. The Victorians loved engraving things. So any number of objects in our shop right now you'll see have got tons of wonderful, weird and wonderful patterns engraved on them, representing all sorts of things which define the era that they were made in. You can see them changing over the years, you can see the engravings change dramatically. And obviously throughout the years, people have had names and inscriptions and dates engraved to personalize their objects.
STEVEN YARDLEY: Majority of our work is about occasions, you know, whether it be a christening, a wedding, birthdays and things like that.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Have you ever got any really weird requests?
STEVEN YARDLEY: We've put some weird stuffing inside wedding rings before. I couldn't remember.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: What kind of stuff?
STEVEN YARDLEY: Well, some of it you probably would want to put on your podcast! Sometimes you might get a couple who might want to put something quite sexual inside something towards one another. Whether they live to regret it ten years later I've got no idea.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Looking back, “Remember when we used to do this?”
STEVEN YARDLEY: Yeah, yeah. Probably looking at each other in disgust now after a few years. So you get something like that occasionally and there's been a few things that we've had up here engraved and thought, "That's not right."
ROB: ‘Widow’s companion’ once.
STEVEN YARDLEY: 'Widow's companion', we’ll let you draw your own conclusions. So we had one of those. Yeah. I think very early days when Tiffany's first opened - they did, didn't they, Rob, is that correct? They used to do - what did they called them? Toot snoot. They used to have a toot snoot. Silver ones. For a very short period of time. They didn't advertise them, but we know what they were for. So you've seen some funny things over the years. But we just do it so many times, I couldn't tell you what I've engraved today. What messages I've done. I've done quite a few messages today, but I wouldn't be able tell you what they were. As long as you spelled it correctly. Oh, you've got to be able to spell quite well. You learn very quickly to see a word that's wrong. You don't maybe know how to spell it correctly yourself; you think "Hang on, that just doesn't look right." To be fair, we don't make many mistakes during a year at all.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: When people come in and are looking at the objects that you have, do you think that something having an engraving from a past owner makes it more appealing to people or less appealing, or does it depend on the situation?
MAX ULLMANN: Massively more appealing to us. Every now and then people will ask us to take an engraving out; but on the whole, because of the fact that we are an antique shop, most people who come into our shop are interested in antiques and therefore they find the personalised inscription from somebody else very attractive and intriguing rather than it being impersonal, which is the perception, I suppose, which some people would have, you know, why would you wanna have somebody else's engraving on it? Well, if it happens to be from 150 years ago, well, that's quite amazing.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Yeah, it gives a sense of history to the object.
MAX ULLMANN: Absolutely. It's part of the personality of it, which is essentially what we are selling: jewellery with a personality.
LISA HACK: When I got the ring was the first time I was travelling abroad for work. Was it? Yeah, it was the first time I travlled abroad. And I was slightly concerned that I was going to get hassle from men because I wasn't married. So my mum says, "Well, shall I give you this ring? And then you can wear it,” to make it look like I was married, and I wouldn't get hassle from random guys And then she lent me the ring and I haven't given it back.
My name's Lisa Hack. I'm wearing my grandmother's wedding ring, which is engraved on the inside with the date of their wedding, in a kind of old style serif kind of font inside. And it's got the initials of my grandparents. H.V.V. and M.D.W. and the 17th of the 8th, 43 and then the goldmark. And the names of my grandparents are Henry Verapatra Vandiar and Mary Dotton Wood. And they got married on 17th of August 1943 in Georgetown, which was then British Guyana and now the Republic of Guyana.
What I know of the ring is that it was probably made by my granddad's brother's family. They had a shop and it was a jewellers and a pawn shop. I actually feel this ring knows things I don’t know and would like to know. I wish I could ask it questions and I wish it could talk to me and tell me who engraved it, what the shop might have looked like, was it a busy street? I've never been to Guyana. So all of this is in my imagination. What was that wedding day like, and what was it like in 1943? This ring witnessed lots of things I've heard about in stories and was on her hand the entire time. The things that it's seen and witnessed - I suppose it's that it represents all the things that I just accept I'm never going to know.
Sometimes if you can feel a bit lost in your identity or where you're from, you can look at that thing and it's a solid piece of evidence of something from somewhere, from somewhere else, from the place that your parents are from that you haven't been to. And it's reassuring in that you can tell the story of that this is where this ring is from, like I am from here, but I'm also from there. And to be proud of the fact that look at this gold, it’s a gorgeous colour, and it's a bit different to the gold you find here and why. And you can talk about it. And I think the engraving just really - it's like a physical manifestation of that, like you can knowwhat the ring is, but to have that engraving in there just gives you that bit of security or reassurance that you're not imagining it all, that is your history. That is where you're from.
MAX ULLMANN: The fact that you're buying an antique wedding ring obviously has all sorts of implications. So if you are superstitious and you don't want to have a ring which may have been due to a divorce or whatever, you probably don't want an antique ring because who knows what's happened? It's probably gone through many, many owners.
FREDDY McCONNELL: My name's Freddy McConnell and I'm a journalist and a writer. I am wearing a ring that - it's funny actually, I've never asked my grandma. It's my grandma's ring. I don't know whether she - when she had it made, it was definitely made for her, it's inscribed with her initials R.A.H. And I would guess that it was probably made for her when she was quite young, I suppose, and given to her by her parents. And it came to me by way of my sister, who has always inherited any family jewellery that has been floating around because she would wear it and I wouldn't. I was always very masculine growing up. But I grew up as a girl and then transitioned in my early 20s, and I think it was around that time will soon after that that I became aware that that my sister had this ring that she wasn't wearing and it was a family ring and it felt like something I would like to have and to wear as a link to family. I love tradition, despite being queer and having radical politics and that sort of stuff. I also am deeply in love with traditional things and objects and ritual and that sort of thing. So this ring just felt like something that I needed to have, I suppose, as a link to my roots and my family. My sister wasn't wearing and she initially didn't want me to have it because I have a reputation for losing things. So it was a long negotiation process of me being like, "Well, you're not literally not wearing it. It's just sitting in a box. Could I have it, and then we can like check in and you can see that I haven't lost it and I promise not to lose it and I won't even take it off ever?" And that was - it must have been. Let me think. Must have been a good 7 years ago now, and I haven't lost it.
So it's really special. I really care a lot about it. And my grandma is kind of a badass. She was like a champion skier and could have played at Wimbledon, I once remember her saying, but wasn't allowed to by her dad. So she's of that generation where she just could have reached incredible heights but wasn't allowed to, for various reasons to do with society and women and limitations and all that sort of stuff. So she's just an amazing person. I come from a family of a lot of really strong women who have achieved amazing things or perhaps could've achieved amazing things if they'd been born in a slightly different time. And that means a lot to me. And yeah, I see myself in that lineage, even though I'm trans and I'm a man. You know, I sort of think that that in any way needs to sort of separate me from those strong women in my past. And being able to wear this ring as a connection to that is just really important to me.
MAX ULLMANN: Old hallmarks, also a kind of engraving, invariably those add value to the item.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Because that's telling you when it like when it was made?
MAX ULLMANN: Exactly. When it was made. Who made it. The city it was made. And we've got an incredible whole marking system in this country, which is second to none, which has been going since around the 12th century, which is still used today. And for the most part, you can trust it. It's very, very difficult to fake. That kind of thing adds value. If it says 18 carat, it's got the initials of the maker. It's got, for example, an anchor, which is very, very common in antique jewellery, so that represents Birmingham, which is traditionally our manufacturing hub. And then it might have a crown which represents Great Britain. And a letter as well, which will denote the year. So you look up in the hallmark directory and match up all of those marks and it will tell you exactly what year was made in. That adds value, personality to the piece, gives you a bit of context. People tend to like those a lot.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Can you just see the marks and be like, ding, ding, ding?
MAX ULLMANN: I can't. No, no, I'm not. I don't have a photographic memory enough to know, but there are certain people that can.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: OK. What do we have here?
MAX ULLMANN: So we have a sterling silver Victorian Edwardian maid's badge with the name Eliza engraved on it. We've got many of these and they're relatively common in the antiques trade, but they're quite intriguing. They're essentially the same as the plastic nametags that employees are given in department stores, but they're made of sterling silver, and they are names like Eliza and Gertrude and Bertha and things like that, predominately women. They were given to the maids and the help generally in well-to-do households in that period. This one is dated 1876. And there are thousands and thousands of these on the market There's all this lovely detailed engraving around the name, which they all have generally, which is just very typical of the Victorians. And they would engrave everything, give everything a pattern border.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Is this kind of level of effort going into the nametag - is that a signal of expectation that that person would be working in that household for a long time?
MAX ULLMANN: Well, I think this is open to interpretation. I've heard various things over the years. One of them has been that if your name was Eliza and you went to work in a house and they didn't have an Eliza name badge, they only had a Bertha, that would be your name for the duration of your tenure. So who knows? I'm sure that they were made for people that were employed for a while, but at the same time, I imagine there was quite a turnaround. So you can see how you would be given a different name. But the level of detail is the same in all of them, which is quite incredible because if you think about if somebody had to make that today, it would take a long time. If it was an expert, it would still take a couple of days, I would have thought. Thinking about how it's how it's done today, you know, punch out the machine. It's done in seconds.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: It's not quite as cool as this one.
MAX ULLMANN: Not quite. Not quite.
EEVA SARLIN: Without the engraving, obviously, you would just think it's a Leatherman.
HZ: The engraved Leatherman multitool belongs to Eeva Sarlin, who is originally from Finland but lived in London for several years. It was passed onto her by her father, who had received it as a gift for his work with the local scout organisation.
EEVA SARLIN: And they engraved it with his name. And my dad already had like a few Swiss knives and a Leatherman, so he decided to give it to me. And this was 2011 or something. I took it and I was studying architecture at the time in London and I just had the Leatherman around and it was kind of handy at home. And then my boyfriend at the time, he was like, “Can I can I borrow your Leatherman?” And he really wanted to carry it around all the time. So I gave it to him and it came in like a leather pouch, and the pouch you can just put it around your belt, so you can carry the Leatherman around all the time. So that's what he did. Except my ex-boyfriend, Dom, decided to put the pouch the wrong way around, so that the leather pouch, instead of having the opening and the button with the snap facing upwards, so if he forgets to put the snap on, the Leatherman wouldn't fall out. But Dom being Dom, he was persistent and he was like, "Oh, it's faster to take it out if it's the other way around." So upside down.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: So he did it on purpose? Argh!!
EEVA SARLIN: It's not a good idea. But anyway, he was carrying it and he always had it with him because it's kind of handy - he was also studying architecture, so it's handy to have a multitool knife and stuff around. And then, of course, maybe a few months after, he just lost the Leatherman. So he was cycling around somewhere in London and then the Leatherman just fell off the pouch onto the streets of London. And so, obviously, that was a lost cause. This was around maybe 2013 that it happened, when it got lost.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: When Dom originally lost the Leatherman, were you angry or upset? Did you feel like that was like a loss of like a sentimental object?
EEVA SARLIN: Yeah, I did, because it is just a handy thing to have, and I was a student at the time, so I didn't really have money to replace it. So I was really angry. And it was like double frustrating because it was like, "I told you so! Don't go carrying things upside down, because it's going to fall out." So, yeah, it was frustrating. I never told my dad that it got lost.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: So he never knew. You were just hoping he'd never ask about the Leatherman again?
EEVA SARLIN: Yeah, I think it because like the funny thing is that I don't think it was like for him, it wasn't really a sentimental item. It was just like something that like the scouts felt like they had to give him something out of gratitude. And then he was like "I don't really need it."
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Did it feel at the time, like when your dad gave it to you, did you see it as more just like, oh, it's just like a practical handy tool to have, or did it feel sentimental to you because your dad gave it to you and it was engraved with his name?
EEVA SARLIN: Yeah, I think so. I've lived abroad since I was 19. I don't really have much of my family around. So it was kind of like something. You know, if I have to fix a screw or like do something around the house, use pliers or whatever, I would just use the Leatherman; and then obviously it had my dad's name on it, so it was a bit like having a remote dad in the form of object, because he is really handy and he would do a lot of repairs around the house and stuff. So this was kind of like a bridge between him not being able to help me because I live abroad. But at least he gives me the tool.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Like a little mini stand-in robot dad. That’s really lovely.
EEVA SARLIN: There is this side to the Leatherman that's not really sentimental, it's just depressing. So once we were just cycling around in London and it was like a super quiet roundabout with no cars coming, so we decided to to just go through the red lights, because it's often safer to have like a clear road without cars rather than waiting for the green light and then all the cars try to overtake you when you're trying to turn into the roundabout. So we did that. And then, my ex Dom is black and we got stopped over by the police. And it ended up with Dom being arrested and taken into custody, and he was charged - he had some homeopathic medicine with him, and the Leatherman on his belt in the pouch, it hadn't fallen off by then, unfortunately. So for the Leatherman, he got charged with a deadly weapon. And then he was held in custody. I'm white and he's black and he's got dreadlocks, so I don't know if they were just assuming that he must've been working for a gang or whatever. And then, of course, because I'm white, like I didn't get anything. I didn't even get fined for cycling through the red lights. But he got fined for just going through red lights, charged for the A-class drugs, and the deadly weapon. And then he was under review for three months.
The Leatherman, in that context, suddenly - my ex was carrying it around because it was really handy for architecture school, for building things or whatever. But like in the context of pretty racist police officers, suddenly the Leatherman just became something they could charge against him. If I'm carrying it as a white female, it's kind of like, oh, I'm into DIY and I'm crafty and I'm like independent woman; it's positive. But if a young black guy is carrying it, he's part of a gang and will go and stab someone to death.
HZ: So the first time the Leatherman went missing was when the police confiscated it. But eventually, they returned the Leatherman to Dom. Then a little later, as aforementioned, it fell out of the pouch as he was cycling around London, and Eeva assumed it was gone for good.
EEVA SARLIN: However, fast forward to this year. This spring, I got a really random text by a Finnish friend of mine. “What's the name for your dad in Finnish?” And I was like, Oh, this is strange. And then I told her. And then she's like, "Oh, yeah, I think I've found a Leatherman, like a multitool that belongs to your dad." And I just couldn't believe it because it was like five years ago that I got it got lost.
HZ: That friend’s husband worked in a brewery in London. He also lost his Leatherman, so his colleagues suggested he replace it with another Leatherman sitting in the brewery’s lost and found. He didn’t really want that one, because it was the cheapest model of Leatherman.
EEVA SARLIN: He was really confused why anyone would buy the cheapest one of the Leatherman and then engrave it with their name. But of course, that's what you would do if you're a scout; it was special for them to engrave it, but they didn't really have much money, apparently.
HZ: So he gave the Leatherman to his wife - Eeva’s friend.
EEVA SARLIN: And when she got it, she was like, "This name rings a bell."
HZ: And after five years, the Leatherman and Eeva were reunited.
EEVA SARLIN: I don't know how on earth - because like, the crazy thing is that the Leatherman had been circulating, it had been probably used or carried around by the person who picked it up when Dom dropped it onto the onto the ground. And and it's just being like, you know, in use. And then randomly, five years after being used, it's lost by its new owner and found again. The odds of it being found from the street is pretty random. And then also the odds of being found by a Finn. And I don't really know any Finns in London either.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Do you feel like if you lost the Leatherman again now, would you just be like, "Oh well, I'm sure it'll make its way back to me"?
EEVA SARLIN: Yeah, I’m just going to lose it on Kyrgyzstan on a hike and assume it'll come back to me on holiday in Thailand or something.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Exactly. Just wait. I'm sure it'll show up somewhere.
EEVA SARLIN: No, I really don't think this is like something that's going to be replicated. I don't think I would trust losing something or leaving something lying around and then it finding its way back to me. I don't think that's going to happen again. I don't intend to lose my Leatherman again.
HZ: You heard from Steven Yardley, Max Ullmann, Lisa Hack, Freddy McConnell, and Eeva Sarlin. They were all talking to Arlie Adlington, and in today’s Minillusionist, we’ll hear why he’s interested in words hammered into pieces of metal.
MINILLUSIONIST
HZ: Arlie, what has got you interested in bits of metal with writing on?
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Well, I think one thing is that I just kind of love trinkets. I just love trinkets. So I feel like that's part of it, is that secretly I just want to talk about and think about shiny objects all the time.
HZ: Like an audio magpie.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Exactly, yeah. I don't like wear much in the way of like jewellery and stuff. But I am always admiring other people's, even if it's not like a style or something that I would wear, I still appreciate what other people are getting up to in terms of their trinket collections.
HZ: But you do have a trinket yourself.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: I do have one. Yes I have one, one trinket which I told you about, which is a ring. It's like a silver ring which is engraved with some words that I got engraved on the ring.
HZ: Are they secret words?
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Well, they won't be anymore. .
Let me just get it off so I can look at it.
HZ: Do you wear it all the time?
ARLIE ADLINGTON: I wear it every day. I usually wear it on my right hand, on my middle finger - or my swear finger, as I was about to call it, and then I remembered that's not actually what it's called. But that one. And it says on it the words ‘resist’, ‘defy’, ‘forge’ and ‘thrive’. Those are words that I decided to get engraved on this ring because I felt like they were really strong words that were kind of aspirational in terms of different aspects of how I wanted to live my life, and specifically as a queer person and a trans person. I guess it's like a kind of aspirational thing. ‘Resist’ is about resisting whatever kind of external pressures you feel to like, you know, not be the person that you are. ‘Defy’ is being a person that defies whatever expectations and just is true to yourself. And ‘forge’, to me, that means like, you know, like try to make things the way you want it, try to make your life the way you want it, try to make the world the way you want it. And then ‘thrive’ is like the super aspirational, actually just like, live an amazing life.
I had a time a few years ago, where I was in Berlin, just on a trip with some friends and my girlfriend at the time, and I think it was one of the really early experiences I had after I'd kind of realized I was trans and I wasn't really having to interact with anybody who was going to misgender me; everyone around me was just affirming who I was. And it felt like a really just lovely space to be in where I felt really affirmed and I felt, I guess, like a little taste of that, like, oh, imagine if the whole world was like this all the time, how different my life would feel and be.
And after that trip, I was trying to hold onto that kind of experience of the world that I had in that place. And that was when I thought about these words and wanted to have a way to try to - I guess in a similar way that people get tattoos of words or whatever that they went to try to remember, it was just like a way of trying to hold onto that feeling. I don't know why I was drawn to engrave the words on something rather than get them tattooed or whatever, because I do have tattoos, I guess I could have done that, but it just wasn't the thing that I thought to do. I think another thing I like about it being like an actual physical object is that maybe one day I'll feel like I have drawn all the strength I need from this thing and maybe I'll end up giving it to somebody else that needs it.
This is the thing that reminds me what the real world is. If the world is making me feel, I don't know, like my understanding of who I am as a person is just my imagination, or that's something that's an illness that I have, or something like that, I want to always remember there might be people that want me - and people like me - to feel like that's the truth. But that's not the truth. Like the real world, even if you don't get to feel it all the time is the one where this thing that you know about yourself, that is just true. And so, yeah, I think of it that way a bit as well. It's like a physical object that it can act as like a reminder of that reality, I suppose.
HZ: It's like an anchor and a talisman.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Yeah, exactly. I had one experience fairly recently - it was when I was seeing a doctor who I was seeing about gender stuff and getting hormones and things. And I had this appointment that I found really upsetting, like the doctor said loads of stuff to me that I was just really like not expecting in terms of... or the stuff that was not cool. I'm on testosterone now and kind of going through that transition process. He had asked me about like, who I'm attracted to, like who I date, that kind of thing, which wasn't actually really relevant. I'm really not sure why he was asking me about that. But that's the kind of thing that happens in these appointments a lot. And he decided to just tell me, like he was just informing me, he said, "Yeah, so in the future, most of the women you date are gonna identify as a straight women."
It was just like a thing that totally threw me because - after processing it afterwards, I realized it was upsetting because I felt he was expressing this idea that like the ultimate goal of you going on testosterone is to basically stop being trans, stop being queer, you can just become like a normal straight person. And he was talking about dating straight women as if that was some kind of upgrade, like you can graduate from having to be queer and just date straight women. And it was just really upsetting because I love queer women, I don't want to stop dating queer women, I don't want to stop being queer. That's not my objective with any of this.
HZ: Also how is any of this his business?
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Exactly. Why are we even talking about it? Like your job is to - you're an endocrinologist. You measure hormone levels in people's bloodstreams, but OK. But yeah, after that appointment, it was the most I've ever felt the power of having this ring, because I think I felt so destabilised by the things that were said in that appointment, I actually really did have an experience of kind of walking down the street in the middle of nowhere, trying to find a bus back to where I needed to go and really feeling like the one thing that was grounding me and making me not feel like I'd just completely disappeared to different planet was this ring. And so I have had at least one moment where it made a really big difference. It felt like the one thing in that moment that I had that was reminding me that my understanding of who I am as a person and my reality was the actual truth, not what someone else was trying to tell me.
It’s kind of vulnerable in a way: when I got this ring engraved, you have to go in and tell a stranger what words you want engraved on a thing, which is kind of like you're telling them something kind of personal and intimate. And they were obviously just like "whatevs", and I'm sure they probably at this point don't even think much about it. Still for you, it's like you have to go in, like you have to tell a person what you want.
HZ: Isn't the same when you get a tattoo, though?
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Yeah, totally. Yeah. You're like, “Ugh, hope they don't think I'm stupid!”
HZ: Whereas they probably don't give a shit.
ARLIE ADLINGTON: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HZ: Maybe they're secretly thinking, "Yes, that's a really good one, but I don't want to say."
ARLIE ADLINGTON: That's the dream. That is the dream.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
nacelle, noun: 1. The outer casing on an aircraft engine; 2. chiefly historical: the car on an airship.
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This episode was produced by Arlie Adlington and me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com, check out his songs.
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